reading ups test scores....duh!

Did anyone see this article in the Times?

From The New York Times
November 19, 2007
Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading

By MOTOKO RICH
Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside,
Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less
for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining.
At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math
and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited,
and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.

That is the message of a new report being released today by the
National Endowment for the Arts, based on an analysis of data from
about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor
Departments and the Census Bureau as well as other academic,
foundation and business surveys. After its 2004 report, “Reading at
Risk,” which found that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read
novels, short stories, plays or poetry, the endowment sought to
collect more comprehensive data to build a picture of the role of all
reading, including nonfiction.

In his preface to the new 99-page report Dana Gioia, chairman of the
endowment, described the data as “simple, consistent and alarming.”

Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary
school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle
school students and slightly declining among high school seniors.
These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading
among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a
drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also
showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed
better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or
hardly at all.

The study also examined results from reading tests administered to
adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are
proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the
proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.

Three years ago “Reading at Risk,” which was based on a study by the
Census Bureau in 2002, provoked a debate among academics, publishers
and others, some of whom argued that the report defined reading too
narrowly by focusing on fiction, poetry and drama. Others argued that
there had not been as much of a decline in reading as the report
suggested.

This time the endowment did not limit its analysis to so-called
literary reading. It selected studies that asked questions about
“reading for fun” or “time spent reading for pleasure,” saying that
this could refer to a range of reading materials.

“It’s no longer reasonable to debate whether the problem exists,” said
Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis for the endowment.
“Let’s not nitpick or wrangle over to what extent is reading in
decline.”

In an interview Mr. Gioia said that the statistics could not explain
why reading had declined, but he pointed to several commonly accepted
culprits, including the proliferation of digital diversions on the
Internet and other gadgets, and the failure of schools and colleges to
develop a culture of daily reading habits. In addition, Mr. Gioia
said, “we live in a society where the media does not recognize,
celebrate or discuss reading, literature and authors.”

In seeking to detail the consequences of a decline in reading, the
study showed that reading appeared to correlate with other academic
achievement. In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders
who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal
Education Department statistics found that those students scored much
lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although
some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar
noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but
whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests
than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were
therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with
fewer than 10 books.

The new report also looked at data from the workplace, including a
survey that showed nearly three-quarters of employers who were polled
rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with two-
year college degrees, and nearly 90 percent of employers said so for
graduates of four-year colleges. Better reading skills were also
correlated with higher income.

In an analysis of Education Department statistics looking at eight
weekly income brackets, the data showed that 7 percent of full-time
workers who scored at levels deemed “below basic” on reading tests
earned $850 to $1,149 a week, the fourth-highest income bracket, while
20 percent of workers who had scored at reading levels deemed
“proficient” earned such wages.

The new report is likely to provoke as much debate as the previous
one. Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus of education at the
University of Southern California, said that based on his analysis of
other data, reading was not on the decline. He added that the
endowment appeared to be exaggerating the decline in reading scores
and said that according to federal education statistics, the bulk of
decreases in 12th-grade reading scores had occurred in the early
1990s, and that compared with 1994 average reading scores in 2005 were
only one point lower.

Timothy Shanahan, past president of the International Reading
Association and a professor of urban education and reading at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that the endowment’s
report was not nuanced enough. “I don’t disagree with the N.E.A.’s
notion that reading is important, but I’m not as quick to discount the
reading that I think young people are really doing,” he said,
referring to reading on the Internet. He added, “I don’t think the
solutions are as simple as a report like this might be encouraging
folks to think they might be.”

urban poverty and education enlightened by HBO's the Wire

Can 'The Wire' Tell Us How to Reach the Unreachable?

A former inner city teacher reflects on a devil's
bargain.
by Lisa Morehouse

11/12/2007
Watching fourth-season episodes of the acclaimed HBO
television series
The Wire, I immediately recognized the students who
were the show's
focus -- the personality- filled teenagers who can
derail a class with
one outburst, who can make great strides for weeks,
then backtrack in
an instant, whose chaotic lives (the little we know
about them) can
make academic problems seem minuscule.

The Wire centers on West Baltimore's "corner kids."
Defined by the
show in contrast with "stoop kids," who grow up in the
ghetto but are
still under their families' watch, corner kids make up
a small
minority of young people, those abandoned by their
families and
committed to and wrecked by the laws of the street.
They're either
unable to function in schools as they exist in much of
inner city
America, or they're savvy enough to know that the
system doesn't serve
them. The Wireasks, "What do we do with these kids?"

And it answers that question with an experiment: In
the show, the most
disruptive corner kids are separated from the rest of
the student body
into their own classroom.

It's not as if this division is a stretch. The most
troubled kids in
schools are often isolated from others, by official
mandate or not.
Research documents the disturbing number of African
American boys
nationwide who are shuffled into special education
classes despite the
lack of evidence that they have learning disabilities.
And many times,
the most defiant students just get kicked out of class
and school.

Even educators committed to the achievement of
students living in
poverty see the pull of a formal separation between
students. Jeffrey
Robinson, principal of Baltimore Talent Development
High School, says,
"I think most principals and most teachers would agree
that if they
could get rid of one to two kids in every class, they
could increase
achievement by a whole lot."

When Carla Finkelstein taught high school in West
Baltimore, her
teaching team had some scheduling autonomy. Each year,
the team
debated creating what they called a "knucklehead
class" but couldn't
philosophically agree on the purpose. Would it be, she
asks, "to get
at the root of what's really going on with those kids,
or to ditto
them to death," keeping them busy with worksheets
while creating calm
learning environments for their other students?

The Wire experiments with what Finklestein calls a
public health
response to corner kids. In the show, a small number
of students are
pulled from general classes and put together with
multiple adults,
including mental health professionals, who work at the
causes of these
students' disruptive behavior and their disengagement
from school.

Finklestein, who now helps run a public charter school
in Baltimore,
says that by playing out this classroom experiment
over a whole
season, the show asks the questions "What would it
look like if it
were done well? and "What social consequences would it
have?" without
providing pat answers. "I think that was a smart piece
for them to put
in the show, because that's a tremendous tension,"
Finklestein says. A
minority of kids come to school with such intractable
issues, she
adds, that "you can't solve the problem just by giving
the kid a tutor
or giving them access to a computer."

Whether teachers agree with The Wire's experiment or
not, the story
line is crushingly on point: After the adults reach
some level of
understanding of the corner kids' real values and
fears, the program
is terminated because of the pressures of standardized
testing.

Lisa Morehouse taught secondary English for twelve
years in San
Francisco and rural Georgia. She is now a public-radio
journalist and
an education consultant.

Roomate Catherine's blog-log

So, Catherine the world traveler just returned from Egypt and has some great reflections in her blog. Past entries have been on time in Uganda, Kenya, Honduras and beyond.

http://www.fairytrue.com/

Special Ed dollars Part II

Following the last article, the Supreme Court has upheld the ruling for special ed students seeking private education can do so without trying public school options first.

Here is the Times article on the ruling:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/education/11school.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

special education: a right to private education?

Chancellor Joe Klein mentioned this article in a recent speech. I found it interesting & I"m not sure exactly where I stand. My friend Brita works for one of these top dollar special needs schools, Winston Prep. I know that many of her students can't afford the private school price tag, but fight to get an education as handicapped students and end up getting small class sizes, progressive, private school education that is far more advantaged in every respect to thier mainstreamed public school youth counter parts.

I also know that many of the youth I work with in East Harlem have IEPs and are getting special education services in thier local public schools with mixed reviews. I wonder if there are any organizations that take on pro-bono work to support low income families of students with special needs to support them finding the right (and possibly cushy private) school? How is it that this small percentage of the nations 6 million or so special ed students end up hitting the schooling lottery?

Here is the article:

Dispute on Private School Payments Heard

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:09 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Taxpayers shouldn't be asked to pick up the cost of private schooling for special education children who don't first give public schools a chance, New York City's top appeals lawyer told the Supreme Court Monday.

Arguing on the first day of the court's new term, Leonard Koerner urged the justices not to make it easier for parents to be reimbursed for private schooling in situations where school districts contend they can take care of children's special needs.

The parent in the case before the court ''had no contact with the system at all,'' Koerner said.

There is no question that the wealthy parent in this case, former Viacom CEO Tom Freston, can afford private schooling for his son, Gilbert.

But Freston, in a statement, said he wasn't pressing the case for personal gain.

''Children with special education needs have a right, without jumping through hoops, to attend schools capable of providing them with an education that accommodates their individual needs regardless of their family's financial means,'' Freston wrote.

Several justices were skeptical of Freston's claims.

Justice Antonin Scalia said affluent parents who have no intention of using public schools might think ''what the heck, if we can get $30,000 from the city, that's fine.''

Freston's lawyer, Paul G. Gardephe, said Congress made clear that it did not want children subjected to inadequate education just to satisfy a technicality of trying out a public school before switching to a better-suited private school.

Justice Samuel Alito agreed that such a requirement ''makes no sense whatsoever.''

Freston's son was diagnosed with learning disabilities in the late 1990s. The family's solution was to send the boy to the Stephen Gaynor School, a top-notch but expensive Manhattan academy for children with learning problems.

Freston sued the city after he asked it to pay his son's tuition and the city refused.

Federal law demands such payments when a public school system is unable to properly deal with a student's disability, but in this case New York said it could do the job. It recommended that the boy attend the city-run Lower Laboratory School for Gifted Education.

Freston won in lower courts and the city appealed to the Supreme Court. Gilbert Freston, now a teenager, has transferred to mainstream schools, his father said.

Nationwide, the number of special education students placed in private schools at public expense has risen steadily, from about 52,012 pupils in 1996 to 71,082 in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Overall, however, the number of such placements remains small -- just 1.1 percent of the country's 6.1 million special education students.

In New York, a growing number of parents have been exploring a private-school option. During the 2002-2003 school year, the city received 3,908 tuition reimbursement requests, Best said. By the 2005-2006 school year, that number had jumped to 4,804.

A decision is expected by spring.

The case is Board of Education of City of New York v. Tom F., 06-637.

a violent assault on women in the congo

Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War
New York Times
Jeffry Gettleman

BUKAVU, Congo — Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore. Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”

The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over. Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo’s various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad government.

But the elections have not unified the country or significantly strengthened the Congolese government’s hand to deal with renegade forces, many of them from outside the country. The justice system and the military still barely function, and United Nations officials say Congolese government troops are among the worst offenders when it comes to rape. Large swaths of the country, especially in the east, remain authority-free zones where civilians are at the mercy of heavily armed groups who have made warfare a livelihood and survive by raiding villages and abducting women for ransom.

According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.

United Nations officials said the so-called Rastas were once part of the Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialize in freelance cruelty.

Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman with high cheekbones and downcast eyes, said she was kidnapped from a village that the Rastas raided in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her delicate neck. The men would untie her for a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.

“I’m weak, I’m angry, and I don’t know how to restart my life,” she said from Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where she was taken after her captors freed her.

She is also pregnant.

While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say they fear that Congo’s problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.

“It’s gone beyond the conflict,” said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said that the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become “almost normal.”

Malteser International, a European aid organization that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this year, compared with 6,338 last year. The organization said that in one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the women reported being sexually brutalized.

At Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Mukwege performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is filled with women lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, with colostomy bags hanging next to them because of all the internal damage.

“I still have pain and feel chills,” said Kasindi Wabulasa, a patient who was raped in February by five men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband’s chest and made him watch, telling him that if he closed his eyes, they would shoot him. When they were finished, Ms. Wabulasa said, they shot him anyway.

In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills here, there is no shortage of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government soldiers; homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who slick themselves with oil before marching into battle; members of paramilitary groups originally from Uganda and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the past 10 years in a quest for gold and all the other riches that can be extracted from Congo’s exploited soil.

The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 17,000 troops.

Few seem to be spared. Dr. Mukwege said his oldest patient was 75, his youngest 3.

“Some of these girls whose insides have been destroyed are so young that they don’t understand what happened to them,” Dr. Mukwege said. “They ask me if they will ever be able to have children, and it’s hard to look into their eyes.”

No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why this is happening.

“That is the question,” said André Bourque, a Canadian consultant who works with aid groups in eastern Congo. “Sexual violence in Congo reaches a level never reached anywhere else. It is even worse than in Rwanda during the genocide.”

Impunity may be a contributing factor, Mr. Bourque added, saying that very few of the culprits are punished.

Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society. “If that were the case, this would have showed up long ago,” said Wilhelmine Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual violence program in Bukavu.

Instead, she said, the epidemic of rapes seems to have started in the mid-1990s. That coincides with the waves of Hutu militiamen who escaped into Congo’s forests after exterminating 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during Rwanda’s genocide 13 years ago.

Mr. Holmes said that while government troops might have raped thousands of women, the most vicious attacks had been carried out by Hutu militias.

“These are people who were involved with the genocide and have been psychologically destroyed by it,” he said.

Mr. Bourque called this phenomenon “reversed values” and said it could develop in heavily traumatized areas that had been steeped in conflict for many years, like eastern Congo.

This place, one of the greenest, hilliest and most scenic slices of central Africa, continues to reverberate from the aftershocks of the genocide next door. Take the recent fighting near Bukavu between the Congolese Army and Laurent Nkunda, a dissident general who commands a formidable rebel force. Mr. Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who has accused the Congolese Army of supporting Hutu militias, which the army denies. Mr. Nkunda says his rebel force is simply protecting Tutsi civilians from being victimized again.

But his men may be no better.

Willermine Mulihano said she was raped twice — first by Hutu militiamen two years ago and then by Nkunda soldiers in July. Two soldiers held her legs apart, while three others took turns violating her.

“When I think about what happened,” she said, “I feel anxious and brokenhearted.”

She is also lonely. Her husband divorced her after the first rape, saying she was diseased.

In some cases, the attacks are on civilians already caught in the cross-fire between warring groups. In one village near Bukavu where 27 women were raped and 18 civilians killed in May, the attackers left behind a note in broken Swahili telling the villagers that the violence would go on as long as government troops were in the area.

The United Nations peacekeepers here seem to be stepping up efforts to protect women.

Recently, they initiated what they call “night flashes,” in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.

But the problem seems bigger than the resources currently devoted to it.

Panzi Hospital has 350 beds, and though a new ward is being built specifically for rape victims, the hospital sends women back to their villages before they have fully recovered because it needs space for the never-ending stream of new arrivals.

Dr. Mukwege, 52, said he remembered the days when Bukavu was known for its stunning lake views and nearby national parks, like Kahuzi-Biega.

“There used to be a lot of gorillas in there,” he said. “But now they’ve been replaced by much more savage beasts.”

Our man in Morningside Heights

The lovely SIPA student/roomate extrodinaire weighs on the her experience at the Ahmadinejad extravaganza yesterday:


You’ve all heard about Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia. For what
it’s worth, here’s my take on the day. Sorry this is long. I need
an editor.

I got into line for the event, standing behind white barriers that
separated us from pedestrians and the media zoo. A man with an
Israeli flag was yelling at people in line. He was ranting and
raving and every journalist in the area circled around him, shoving
mics in his face. I thought of Ahmadinejad and how the loudest and
craziest person in the crowd always seems to always get the
microphone.

A Columbia alumnus walked by with a sign that said, “A man of lies
does not belong in a place of truth.” A girl standing next to me
asked out loud, “What’s a place of truth?” Then it occurred to
her,
“Oh, the university? Is a university a place of truth? What does
that mean? I thought he meant heaven.” The protester stopped to
tell us how dismayed he was with his alma mater.

A black guy in a dapper pin stripe suit told a Jewish student near
me that he had taken the day off from work because he thought the
plight of the Jews was his plight and that a denial of the
Holocaust was the equivalent of a denial of slavery. He seemed
eager to attract a journalist’s attention, which he quickly did.

I’ve never seen so many journalists in one place. I swear every
other person had a reporter’s notebook, mic or camera. Students
were lining up for their chance for a sound bite. I saw reporters
from Le Monde, NY1 (including J-School’s Lily Jamali), Telemundo,
Fox, BBC, the major local networks and Al Jazeera.

The guy with the Israeli flag came by and shouted at us, “You guys
gotta be brave and say something. If you go in there, say
something!”

I met two undergrad students while standing in line. Ron and Jordan,
both Jewish, helped organize the campus protests and were wearing
black anti-Ahmadinejad t-shirts. Jordan was vehemently opposed to
the event and yet seemed excited to be there and welcomed the
opportunity to talk to journalists. Ron was more conflicted over
it. The two of us debated the many issues surrounding the day as we
waited for the big guys to take the stage. Once we took our seats,
Ron and Jordan started working on their questions.

“What do you ask this guy?” asked one of their friends, throwing
his
arms up in the air.

“I don’t know,” said Jordan. “I’m stumped.” The young
student
protesters started to talk about what they’d do when the talk got
underway. Would they clap? Boo? Walk out?

I brought a copy of last spring’s Journal of International Affairs
and read articles from it to pass the time. In an article about
Ahmadinejad this quote stood out, “The spectacle seemed to matter
more than the substance.”

Finally, a group of 20 male, Iranian delegates walked out from
behind the stage and took their seats in the front row. They were
wearing matching gray suits and no neckties. Then, Ahmadinejad came
out. People in the crowd cheered and a group of five students in the
front stood and clapped for him. Ron and Jordan were disgusted. Ron
turned to me and said, “I don’t know if it’s different for you
because you’re not Jewish, but at times like these I just want to
move to Israel. You?” While surprised by the support for
Ahmadinejad, I told Ron that no, I didn’t want to move to Israel.

The stage looked stark with a black backdrop. No one shook hands.
Ahmadinejad sat down on stage left under a spotlight. He looked
smug, small and alone. Around the auditorium, shoulder-to-shoulder,
stood American secret service and Iranian security. A lot of men
with guns were required to conduct this “free exchange of ideas.”

Bollinger’s words are now famous. He apologized to those for whom
this day caused pain, but he said, “We need to understand the world
we live in. We need to know our enemies.”

“You exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. Do you
plan on wiping us off the map too?”

Ahmadinejad smiled throughout. He seemed itching to jump off of his
seat and respond to Bollinger.

“I doubt that you will have the courage to answer these questions,
but your avoidance of them will serve us too,” said Presbo.

In that moment, I was proud. I was proud of the university, of
President Bollinger, of being an American student and of the School
of International and Public Affairs. I thought he stood up to a
tyrant. I don’t think civil discourse has to be unemotional or
impassionate.

I found it bizarre that it fell upon a university president to do so
and I also wondered why invite someone to campus just to slam them?
But, in my gut, I felt like Bollinger had just done something
heroic. Once I got back to school, I found that most SIPA students
thought Bollinger had been uncivil and rude. They thought he had
overcompensated, worried about his critics and funds being
withdrawn from the school.

Ahmadinejad began his talk. The rhythm of his speech was sort of
hypnotic. It seemed like nonsensical babble. Education is light and
enlightenment and neglecting it will leave you stranded in the
desert in the shadow of darkness without the angels and prophets.
But then his vague, rambling speech took a turn and he began to say
that scientific method, when in the wrong hands, threatened
cultures. He seemed to be saying that the United States is tearing
the Iranian people from their roots and their culture. His tone
became emotional as he attacked the US for its own nuclear
ambitions.

I thought this man has zero diplomatic finesse. He was a bully. The
atmosphere was tense. I thought he exposed his own stupidity, lack
of intellectual reasoning and hatred.

At the end of the hour, he invited a delegation of Columbia students
and professors to come to Iran. “You can go to ANY university you
like. I’ll give you a list.”

For me, the day was enormously valuable. My time spent talking with
Ron and Jordan was interesting and informative. After classes, Bill
Wheeler (friend and fellow J-School/SIPA student) and I tried to
wrap our heads around the day and our talk left me with lots to
think about.

The protests seemed to invigorate the campus. Students were
thinking, talking, feeling and interacting with each other. I think
a lot of people met yesterday over discussing what had happened. I
also learned plenty about Ahmadinejad. But it was really the
conversations I had with other students that made the day unique
and memorable.

Le fin.

NY says no to abstinence only sex ed

September 21, 2007
New York Just Says No to Abstinence Funding

By JENNIFER MEDINA
New York is rejecting millions of dollars in federal grants for abstinence-only sex education, the state health commissioner, Dr. Richard F. Daines, announced yesterday. The decision puts New York in line with at least 10 other states that have decided to forgo the federal money in recent years.

New York has received roughly $3.5 million a year from the federal government for abstinence-only education since 1998. The abstinence program was approved as part of welfare overhauls under the Clinton administration and was expanded and restructured under President Bush.

In a statement posted on the Health Department’s Web site, Dr. Daines said, “The Bush administration’s abstinence-only program is an example of a failed national healthcare policy directive.” He added that the policy was “based on ideology rather than on sound scientific-based evidence that must be the cornerstone of good public healthcare policy.”

The state had also spent $2.6 million annually to fund the same programs over the last decade. That money will now be spent on other existing programs for sex education, Dr. Daines said in an interview.

Supporters of abstinence-only education said it should remain an option. “We’ve seen a lot of attacks on this program,” said Leslee Unruh, the president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, based in South Dakota. “A lot of kids that are abstaining are made to feel as if they are from a Victorian age and they are not with the ‘Sex and the City’ crowd.”

Dr. Daines’s announcement came the same day that the New York Civil Liberties Union, which opposes abstinence-only education, released a report detailing the number of such programs in the state. The report stated that roughly half of the groups teaching abstinence in the state were religious groups and that the state had done almost nothing to monitor them.

Dr. Daines said that existing state programs include discussion of abstinence. But he said the state made the decision based on evidence that the abstinence-only program did little to prevent teen pregnancies. He said he also objected to the program’s “narrow ideological view, which is not the direction we want to go in for sexual health.” He said the state should encourage the teaching of the use of condoms and include discussions of abstinence.

Congress is expected to take up funding for abstinence-only education at the end of the month. California, Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island are among the states that have rejected such money.

According to the civil liberties union report, New York was second only to Texas in the amount of money it received for abstinence education. The federal government also gives roughly $6 million directly to community groups in New York for such programs, according to the report.

Sex education is not mandated by New York State, which leaves it to individual districts to adopt their own curriculum.

In July, the Health Department sent letters to nearly 40 community organizations and hospitals that had received the funding, stating that their contracts would not be renewed. The letter did not mention why the contracts were being canceled.

“We think it is a good thing that they are making efforts to close programs that were misinforming adolescents,” said Galen Sherwin, the director of the Reproduction Rights Project for the New York Civil Liberties Union, who wrote the report . “But there is still a long way to go before you get to comprehensive, medically sound sex education.”

Both Dr. Daines and Ms. Sherwin cited recent studies, including one by the federal Government Accountability Office, which concluded that abstinence programs have not proven to be effective and have sometimes taught teens inaccurate medical information about sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.

mcblog

some of the mcdonnell women are starting a group blog. if you want to stop by, check out mcblog on my link. so far, I'm the only nerd posting, but they'll creep out.

Welcome!

This is my second attempt at blogging. The first, "Educator Exhales" (lame name, I know), was a reflection on my first year of teaching. I loved taking the time for reflection, but found myself in a precarious position, not knowing for certain if it was safe and ethical to be posting information about my students out in cyberspace.

This blog will be a bit looser in structure and I expect will be a place to share stories about teaching & traveling, as well as highlighting the good work that family and friends are doing to fight the good fight...


Just so ya know...
I promise NOT to use this site for:
1. posting my two cents on Lost or any of my other shows.
2. Venting about roomate, co-worker, school, boy, person on the subway issues.

But, I may use this site for:
1. anecdotal stories while teaching
2. questions that arise from teaching
3. reflections on work that I'm exploring
4. lotsa photos of perty place I've been
5. links to articles, etc that connect to what I'm doing.
6. lotsa bragging about the good things my little sisters, other family members and friends are doing

Ok, enjoy.

what book are you?

A site to find out what book you would be:
http://bluepyramid.org/ia/bquiz.htm


Here is a roundup of results:

Jen Holmes and Libby are The Poisonwood Bible

Rebecca is A Prayer for Owen Meany

Jake is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I am Lolita

* this is somewhat alarming as a teacher when you read the description.:

Considered by most to be depraved and immoral, you are
obsessed with sex. What really tantalizes you is that
which deviates from societal standards in every way,
though you admit that this probably isn't the best and
you're not sure what causes this desire. Nonetheless,
you've done some pretty nefarious things in your life,
and probably gotten caught for them. The names have
been changed, but the problems are real. Please stay
away from children.

the spirit of giving

I know I'm a bit behind on this story, over a year, actually, but Jake was just telling me the other day about Warren Buffet's philosophy on philantrophy and his take on this idea of the genetic lottery vs. the self made man and I think it's really fascinating. Wow. $40 billion dollars. That's huge. The Gates Foundation is certainly worlds apart from any other philanthropic organization out there today. Being a teacher, I can see what a tremendous impact they have had on urban education with thier New Vision schools. Cheers to Warren Buffett, the Gates and the possiblility that this will surge a new wave in foundations and philanthropic activity. I only hope others don't go with the hording it away for some 30 years model.

Here is the link to the Fortune magazine article that announced this donation:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/25/magazines/fortune/charity1.fortune/

articles about new Arabic public school

The Khalil Gibran International School is supposed to open it's doors Sept. 4th, but is getting alot of heat at the Dept. of Ed by hot heads who think that the school will be an indoctrination camp for radical Islamic belief. Ironically, the school is named after a Christian Lebanese-American poet.
A couple articles on the school listed below:

Associated Press
Extra Security for NYC Arabic School
By COLLEEN LONG 08.29.07, 6:34 PM ET
NEW YORK -
An Arabic-themed public school will open next week with extra security after months of protest by some who say it will be a training ground for radical Islam.

Enrollment is nearly full at the 60-student Khalil Gibran International Academy, which will require its students to take Arabic as a foreign language, said Department of Education spokeswoman Melody Meyer on Wednesday.

Sixth-graders will be the first to attend the school, which will add a grade each year to end up with 500 to 600 students in grades 6-12. It joins a number of small public schools in the city that have themes, covering areas from the arts to social justice to Chinese language.

The school, named after a Christian Lebanese poet who promoted peace, is the first in the city to offer instruction in Arabic and on Arab culture.

"We need more Arabic speakers in this country, and that's part of the reason this school is being opened," Meyer said. Two of the five teachers hired at the school graduated from universities with federally funded programs aimed at boosting the number of schools in the U.S. teaching Arabic, she said.

Since the school was announced in February, critics have attacked the school as a potential training ground for radicals. Because of protests, it has had to move to a new building and its principal resigned.

An organization called the Friends of Gibran Council, which claims its mission is to advance the philosophy of Gibran, also formed this year in part to prevent the school from "hijacking the name of this great artist," a spokesman said Wednesday.

It was originally going to take space in an elementary school in Brooklyn. Parents at the school objected for a number of reasons, including whether the ideological controversy would create a security risk.

The Department of Education moved the school to operate within a high school and middle school in Brooklyn.

Khalil Gibran's first principal, Debbie Almontaser, left earlier this month amid criticism for her affiliation with a group that had T-Shirts with the word "intifada," an Arabic term commonly used to refer to the Palestinian uprising against Israel. She was replaced by acting interim principal Danielle Salzberg, a Jewish woman who does not speak Arabic.

Meyer said there are no special plans for the first day of school, but education officials are taking into account the controversy and will provide extra security.

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed



New York Times
August 21, 2007
Protesters Seek Leader’s Return to Arabic School
By JENNIFER MEDINA
About 200 demonstrators gathered in front of the headquarters of the city’s Department of Education last evening, voicing their support for the beleaguered Khalil Gibran International Academy. Many of them called for the reinstatement of the school’s founding principal, who resigned under pressure this month after she defended the word “intifada” as a T-shirt slogan.

The group — a mix of students, parents, teachers and activists from a wide range of organizations — blamed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein for the school’s struggles, saying they did not do enough to help the founding principal, Debbie Almontaser.

Ms. Almontaser, an immigrant from Yemen who had worked in the school system for many years and was known for her work with groups that promote interfaith religious dialogue, was repeatedly portrayed by some in the news media as an extremist.

“This is nothing more than demonizing and vilifying a woman and an entire group of people,” said Deborah Howard, a speaker at the protest and a parent who had worked with Ms. Almontaser on the plans to open the middle school in Brooklyn. “Anyone who knows Debbie knows that she is a woman of peace. I am furious that the Department of Education did not support her.”

To that, people in the audience began chanting “bring Debbie back,” as they did several times during the hourlong protest, which brought several school officials out of their offices at Tweed Courthouse headquarters. Danielle Salzberg, an educator who is Jewish and speaks no Arabic, was appointed last week as the interim principal.

A department spokeswoman said officials were focused only on opening the school in the fall.


August 15, 2007
How New Arabic School Aroused Old Rivalries
By JULIE BOSMAN and JENNIFER MEDINA
When aides to Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein were presented last fall with a proposal for an Arabic language and culture school, they thought the idea could be controversial. But they said they could not resist the appeal of a school that seemed right for the times and that would be a piece of the school system’s mosaic of dual-language programs.

Those intentions ran straight into the treacherous ethnic and ideological political currents of New York and were overwhelmed by poor planning, inadequate support for the principal and relentless criticism from some quarters of the news media, primarily The New York Post and The New York Sun.

The founding principal of the school, known as the Khalil Gibran International Academy, Debbie Almontaser, a Yemeni immigrant with a long pedigree in the school system, resigned on Friday under pressure after defending the word “intifada” as a T-shirt slogan. On Monday, the schools chancellor hastily appointed Danielle Salzberg, an educator who is Jewish and speaks no Arabic, as the interim principal, prompting taunting tabloid headlines like “School Bad Idea Even Before Hebrew Ha-ha.”

And Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was again explaining his administration’s handling of the school. “You don’t have to speak Arabic in order to run a school,” he said at an unrelated appearance yesterday in the Bronx.

“We don’t look at anybody’s ethnicity in anything else and we’re not going to start here. This is a school we should do, we’re going to do, and I’m sorry the last woman didn’t work out, but I think we’re better off going out and attacking the problem again, and I think we’ve got the right person.”

But supporters and opponents alike wondered how the administration had blundered so badly in a city where Mideast politics can be as passionately debated as in Tel Aviv or in Gaza.

“I believe there is nothing wrong with having a school related in Islamic culture,” said former Mayor Edward I. Koch. “ I don’t think there is anything wrong with the idea at all.” He added, referring to Ms. Almontaser: “They were too quick to fire her though. I thought she apologized and gave what she thought was an adequate response and is believable.”

The tumult continued yesterday morning, as dozens of parents and teachers showed up for orientation at the school in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. A staff member said that one parent asked Ms. Salzberg whether the children would be the focus of relentless media attention.

Indeed, just a few moments after she tried to assure the parents, they walked out to see television cameras outside.

“This is their midsummer debacle,” said Henry J. Stern, a former parks commissioner. “The idea was well-intentioned but utterly unreal.”

Certainly the school system is no stranger to ideological and ethnic ferment. School decentralization was born out of the clash in Ocean Hill-Brownsville four decades ago that pit black activists against the then-largely Jewish teachers union. Multicultural curriculums, the Harvey Milk school for gay adolescents, and the ousting of black and Hispanic school boards have all had their days of attention.

Ms. Almontaser was known as a community organizer in Brooklyn who had worked with interfaith organizations and helped organize peace rallies after 9/11. She was working with New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit group that helped start dozens of schools in recent years.

Khalil Gibran was intended to serve 60 students, all sixth graders, with just two classrooms.

Garth Harries, who is in charge of planning the city’s new schools, said the idea for an Arabic-themed school was appealing from the beginning.

“It had a particular focus, it had an international studies theme, as well as an emphasis on Arabic language,” Mr. Harries said in an interview yesterday. “That dimension of it was something that we saw as useful and enabling to that core goal of a quality rigorous core education.”

He said officials knew there could be problems ahead. “We were obviously conscious that this was a sensitive subject,” Mr. Harries said. “ That was something that the planning team had been aware of from the very beginning.”

But if they were aware, they did little to help and defend Ms. Almontaser, or even pave the way for the school with parents, many political figures and education officials said.

Only months after plans for the school were announced, a group of vocal parents and administrators at Public School 282 in Park Slope, which was to share space with Khalil Gibran, managed to have it moved elsewhere. Columnists in The New York Sun began attacking the school and suggesting that Ms. Almontaser was an extremist. Some high-profile figures, like Diane Ravitch, the historian of the New York school system, questioned why the city should have specialized language and cultural schools at all.

And Ms. Almontaser, with her limited experience as an administrator in the public eye, appeared unprepared for the onslaught.

“This is not a job where you want to learn on the job,” said one former high-ranking school official who did not want to second-guess the administration on the record because he still has dealings with the city. “If you’re going to be thrown into the deep end, what you need is someone who is an experienced official.” Ms. Almontaser gave an interview to The Post last week, and was asked about T-shirts sold by an organization that shares space with a Yemeni group that Ms. Almontaser belongs to. Her attempt to explain away the term intifada on the shirts began a weeklong onslaught of damaging headlines.

“I am surprised that in the few weeks before the school started, the principal — as opposed to a Department of Education official — would be talking to the press about an issue that doesn’t relate to the school,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, who has been critical of Ms. Almontaser’s remarks.

“She has no experience as a principal, and there was no support for her,” Ms. Weingarten said.

Education officials say that they were trying to keep the focus on opening the school. “We can’t control all the ways that the discussion goes,” Mr. Harries said.

Education officials turned to Ms. Salzberg to take over the school. Robert L. Hughes, the president of New Visions, said she was chosen based on her experience with the school over the last several months.

“I think that the calculation here was that we wanted to make sure that there was continuity for the faculty, the students who had accepted the school, and the planning process that had been in place for the last six to eight months,” Mr. Hughes said. “Given those circumstances, Danielle was the natural choice.”

Ms. Weingarten compared Ms. Salzberg to a relief pitcher in the eighth inning of a baseball game. “She’s started a lot of small schools,” she said. “They had to find somebody quickly who would have the confidence of opening a new school.”

But once again a principal seemed caught by surprise by the attention as details emerged about her religious identity, where she goes to synagogue and her signing of a petition to Orthodox rabbis asking them to do more to help Jewish women whose husbands will not grant them religious divorces. A person close to Ms. Salzberg said she has been stunned by the media attention. The Education Department has declined to make her available for interviews.

Even as the department pressed on, promising to open the school on time despite the criticism, it was faced with a relatively low enrollment — 44 students, most of them black and Hispanic and only six with any Arabic-language skills, according to officials.

Some were left wondering whether the whole effort was worth the fuss. “It’s only worth it if you have gone into the Muslim community and found a tremendous desire to have a school like this,” Mr. Koch said. He said he also found the selection of Ms. Salzberg strange. “To put a principal totally unimmersed in the culture seems like spitting in their eye,” he said.

But Lena Alhusseini, the executive director of the Arab-American Family Support Center, a partner with the school, said yesterday, “I’m very excited about the school, and I’m looking forward to working with Danielle.”